A Primer on “What’s the Big Deal about LNG?”

Here’s the short version: the Alaska LNG project will bring natural gas from the North Slope down to Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula, for export to buyers in Asia. In order to load the gas onto the ships that will carry it across the Pacific, it has to be liquefied.

And it’s a huge project. The estimated price tag is $45 to $65 billion dollars.

Lydia Johnson works for ExxonMobil. She’s the technical manager for the Alaska LNG project.

Johnson: This is way bigger than TAPS [the Trans Alaska Pipeline System]. This is one of the largest, most complex projects in the world today.

The key point — if you remember just one thing — is that the Alaska LNG project is not just a pipeline. It actually has three big pieces. First, there’s a gas treatment plant on the North Slope, to prepare the gas for the pipeline. Then there’s the pipeline itself, running some 800 miles down to Cook Inlet. And then there’s a giant liquefaction plant in Nikiski.

Johnson says each one of the components is a megaproject in its own right.